How can you ensure that an audience enjoy a story that everybody knows, about characters that we know die tragically in the end? Through the use of irony, Shakespeare’s prologue to The Tragedy of Romeo & Juliet cleverly presents the overarching themes of love and fate to intrigue the minds of an Elizabethan (and modern) audience. His first sonnet in the play makes an opening splash on stage and sends ripples of love, fate, and uncertainty, throughout the five acts of Romeo & Juliet.
The opening quatrain of the Prologue artfully sets the scene for the play, introduce characters and explain the main source of the dramatic purpose: “Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean” (lines 1,2,3,4). The …show more content…
Shakespeare alludes to the possible without defining how or why this is a threat. The gruesome image of ‘civil hands’ becoming unclean cements the notion in the mind of the audience that seemingly good people will turn to drastic and possibly fatal acts in order to uphold this ‘grudge’. The audience knows what will happen, they know that Romeo and Juliet must die, but these powerful introductory images ensure that we are intrigued to know how and more importantly, why. Suggesting ‘dignified’ citizens, such as their parents, are the source of the danger, makes the tragedy of their deaths seem even more poignant, and is the source of the dramatic irony - we expect the worse and wait for it to happen. The sense of dramatic irony is further compounded when we are presented with a blur of opposing images of love and death. Most famously, “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;” introduce the concept of fate overriding our hero and heroine (line 5). The quasi-religious force that meanders through the consciousness of the Elizabethan audience presents the inevitability of both the love of
The opening quatrain of the Prologue artfully sets the scene for the play, introduce characters and explain the main source of the dramatic purpose: “Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean” (lines 1,2,3,4). The …show more content…
Shakespeare alludes to the possible without defining how or why this is a threat. The gruesome image of ‘civil hands’ becoming unclean cements the notion in the mind of the audience that seemingly good people will turn to drastic and possibly fatal acts in order to uphold this ‘grudge’. The audience knows what will happen, they know that Romeo and Juliet must die, but these powerful introductory images ensure that we are intrigued to know how and more importantly, why. Suggesting ‘dignified’ citizens, such as their parents, are the source of the danger, makes the tragedy of their deaths seem even more poignant, and is the source of the dramatic irony - we expect the worse and wait for it to happen. The sense of dramatic irony is further compounded when we are presented with a blur of opposing images of love and death. Most famously, “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes a pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;” introduce the concept of fate overriding our hero and heroine (line 5). The quasi-religious force that meanders through the consciousness of the Elizabethan audience presents the inevitability of both the love of